Yale learned, as they drove, that Cecily had an eleven-year-old son and an ex-husband, a small apartment on Davis Street, and a degree from Skidmore. She didn’t ask a single thing about him in return.
When they reached Sturgeon Bay, at the bottom of the Door County spike, Cecily unfolded a giant Wisconsin map and pointed with a clear-polished nail to the two routes that climbed either side of the peninsula. “It looks like they meet again in Sister Bay, which is where we’re headed anyway.”
“What have they got up here?” Yale said. “What’s the big attraction?”
“Lighthouses, I think. Honeymooners.”
“It is beautiful.”
She snapped her head up and looked across Yale, out his window, as if she’d just realized where she was. “Yes. Very.”
“So, you’ll run the show?”
“If you don’t mind.”
Yale did mind, in principle. The letter was intended for him. But this was an issue of rank. And he’d wind up glad it wasn’t all about the art if the art proved forged.
He had chosen the western route, and Cecily directed him to County Road ZZ. “I wonder if they say Double Z,” she said. “Or just Z.”
“Or Zee-Zee,” Yale said. “Like ZZ Top.”
Cecily actually laughed, a small miracle. But then, as she watched out her window, he saw her shoulders tense, her face fall. These were not mansions. They’d driven past some large estates on the way, but now they passed modest farmhouses, small places set in big fields. Stunning, in fact, but not millionaire land.
They pulled up in front of a white house with a screened porch out front and a single gabled window upstairs. Hanging baskets of flowers, neat cement steps to the porch door. Two old Volkswagens sat outside a freestanding one-car garage in disrepair.
Cecily checked her hair in the rearview. She said, “We’re screwed.”
“Maybe she’s senile,” Yale said. “Could she be delusional?”
Before they reached the door, a young woman came out on the steps. She waved, not happily.
Cecily and the woman shook hands. This was Debra, the granddaughter, and she apologized that, although Nora was dressed and ready, the lawyer wasn’t here yet. She bore no resemblance to Fiona or Nico. Black hair, dark circles under her eyes, skin that was somehow both tanned and pasty. Maybe it was makeup, the wrong shade of powder.
They followed her through the screened porch and into a living room that reminded Yale of the house where he took piano lessons as a kid. Like his piano teacher, Nora had covered every inch of shelf and windowsill with carefully chosen objets—glass figurines and seashells and plants and framed photographs. The books looked read, and a stuffed record case abutted the fireplace. The couch back was frayed. This might have been the home of a college professor or a retired therapist, someone of relative means who didn’t put stock in pretentious furnishings. But it was not, no, the home of a major art collector.
Nora—it had to be her, though while the dossier said she was ninety, this woman’s face looked no older than seventy-five—appeared in the opposite doorway, aided by a walker. She took a long while to start speaking, her lips moving silently before the sound came out. “I’m so glad you could make it up.” Her voice, surprisingly, was assured, quick, and as she kept talking Yale realized it wasn’t her mind or her mouth that had tripped her up, but something else. “Now Debra’s going to bring us some tea,” she said, “and Stanley, that’s my lawyer, Stanley will be here in a minute. And we can get acquainted!” She lowered herself, with Debra’s help, into a chair that was still brown at the creases but putty-colored where the sun hit. She stared intensely at Yale, and only Yale, the entire time, and he began to wonder if he was why she’d paused in the door, why she’d hesitated. Perhaps Fiona had filled her in, explained how Yale fit into Nico’s world. Yale was suddenly conscious of his shoes, worried she’d recognize them.
Yale and Cecily sat on a low blue couch whose gravity pulled them both toward the middle. Yale had to fight sliding in that direction and colliding with Cecily, who had anchored herself by holding onto the couch arm. She’d been silent since they walked in, and he could feel her seething beside him.
Debra said, “I’m happy to get the tea, but would you refrain from discussing things while I’m gone?”
Yale assured her, and Nora, behind her granddaughter’s back, mugged—a child-behind-the-substitute-teacher roll of the eyes.
Nora wore a pink tracksuit, velour, and moccasins with ripping seams. Yale wondered if it was her haircut that made her look younger than her age. Instead of short curls, the classic old lady cut, her white hair fell in a straight, smooth bob. She was built like Fiona, small and slender. There were older people you couldn’t imagine young, and there were those whose faces still held on to what they’d looked like at twenty-five. Nora was of another breed, the ones who had apparently reverted to their own childhood faces. Yale looked at Nora and saw the five-year-old she’d been, impish and precocious and blue-eyed. Maybe it had something to do with her smile, too, the way she touched all her fingers to her cheeks.
Cecily was just sitting there, so Yale filled the silence. “You’re Fiona’s great-aunt,” he said.
Nora beamed. “Don’t you just love her? My brother Hugh, that was her grandfather. Hers and Nico’s,” she said. “Nico and I were the artists in the family. Everyone else is so literal-minded, every one of them. Well, we’re still waiting on Fiona. We’ll see about her. Don’t you worry a bit? But Nico was a true artist.”
Yale said, “We were close friends.” He didn’t want to get emotional now. What would Cecily think if he broke down here on the couch? This old woman didn’t look much like Nico, but she was beautiful, and Nico had been beautiful, and wasn’t that enough?
Nora rescued him. “Tell me about the gallery.” She coughed into the balled-up Kleenex she’d held, this whole time, in her hand.
Yale turned to Cecily, who shrugged. And though Yale had no serious illusions left about the woman’s art collection—the only framed things in the room were snapshots and studio family portraits—he began talking. “We started five years ago. Right now we only do rotating exhibitions, both our own and from peer institutions, but we’re starting to build a permanent collection. That’s my job.”
“Oh!” Nora looked agitated, impatient. She shook her head quickly. “I hadn’t realized you were a Kunsthalle.”
Yale was surprised by the word, and Cecily looked confused, irritated. “It just means a rotating gallery,” he said to Cecily, but perhaps it was the wrong thing to do, making her seem uninformed. To Nora he said, “But we’re building a permanent collection. We have the power of a world-class university behind us, plus the donor potential of a successful alumni base and one of the world’s major art cities.” He was talking like a fundraising robot, not like someone who’d slow danced with this woman’s grandnephew last New Year’s Eve, someone who’d stood over Nico’s hospital bed and said that no matter what happened, he and Charlie would take care of Fiona. Nora blinked, expecting more. He said, “We’re already strong in prints and drawings. I understand some of your works are sketches.”